Human Trafficking News from SF Public Presshttp://sfpublicpress.org/taxonomy/term/1922/all
The Mission of The Public Press is to enrich the civic life of San Francisco by delivering public interest journalism to broad and diverse audiences, through print and interactive media not supported by advertising.enWithout long-term support, human trafficking survivors at risk of re-exploitationhttp://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-08/without-long-term-support-human-trafficking-survivors-at-risk-of-re-exploitation
<p><strong><span style="font-size:16px;"><em>Some who flee captive labor conditions end up with low-wage jobs, insecure housing</em></span></strong></p>
<p>When Lili Samad was hired to work as a nanny for an Egyptian government official in the Bay Area, she thought it was an ideal job. Instead, she said, she was forced to work long hours doing domestic chores and forbidden from contacting her family in Indonesia and was often locked inside the house.</p>
<p>“First when I arrived there, they treated me like a prisoner,” Samad said.</p>
<p>After almost 3½ years, for which she was paid just $1,000, she sought help from a neighbor she had met a few times. She said the neighbor concealed her in the back seat of a car and took her to a police station.</p>
<p>But after she escaped, Samad faced a whole new set of challenges: finding housing and a stable job to pay for it. Samad stayed with the neighbor for a few months before moving to the Asian Women’s Shelter, a San Francisco nonprofit that provides temporary housing for women who have suffered violence. There, case managers connected her to community rehabilitation services for victims. Still, the road to recovery was rocky. Over the course of six years, she lived in four temporary apartments before settling down in subsidized housing.</p>
<p>People trafficked into the country — through force, fraud or coercion — receive temporary government and nonprofit social service benefits after rescue or flight from captivity. These include shelter, health care, counseling, employment and legal help. Victims are helped to stay here in exchange for cooperation with law enforcement, and because they might face retribution from trafficking rings if they returned home.</p>
<p>But once these benefits term out, counter-trafficking specialists worry that victims, who generally have little work experience and weak social and family networks, could fall back into labor conditions as exploitative as the ones they fled.</p>
<p>As a victim of international labor trafficking, Samad received government help to stay in the U.S. But she is among hundreds of trafficking survivors each year who end up, months after getting help trying to build a new life, living in marginal housing and working in low-wage jobs.</p>
<p>Samad, who works part-time as a waitress at an elder care facility with her husband and lives in a low-income public housing unit in the Bay Area, said their combined income is only sufficient to pay for basic needs.</p>
<p>“We cannot spend on other things, so only food and rent,” she said.</p>
<p>From fiscal year 2002 through May of this year, the U.S. government issued 3,042 visas for trafficking victims, called T-1 Nonimmigrant Status visas, data from the U.S.</p>
<p>Citizenship and Immigration Services show. These provide temporary protection and a chance to apply for permanent residency for those trafficked from foreign nations.</p>
<p>Experts say it is difficult to identify and quantify the number of victims in this country or those who are re-exploited. Not all victims of sex or labor trafficking seek help from government agencies or community groups. And international trafficking incidents in the U.S. are diverse. They can involve the exploitation of farm laborers by contracting companies, the abuse of domestic workers by foreign diplomats and the coercion of people into prostitution by pimps.</p>
<p>Traffickers often hide victims in their homes, brothels, boats or other clandestine locations.</p>
<h3>Risk of re-exploitation</h3>
<p>A recent in-depth academic study by researchers at the University of Texas, Austin and North Carolina A &amp; T State University, looked at women in Texas who had been trafficked from other countries. It showed that victims need targeted, long-lasting and culturally sensitive services to help them rebuild their lives.</p>
<p>Almost all of the women interviewed for the study now work in restaurants, hotels and other service jobs. This presents a challenge for their rehabilitation, said Noël Busch-Armendariz, director of the Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault at the School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin, and one of the authors of the report, published in the Journal of Applied Research on Children.</p>
<p>One of the long-term needs of trafficking survivors is acquiring new life and professional skills, so they can move toward jobs that give them more security and income, Busch-Armendariz said.</p>
<p>“If we don’t give survivors and their children ways to fully integrate, ways to be self-sufficient, they could continue to be targeted as somebody who could be exploited,” she said.</p>
<p>A 38-year-old single mother from the Philippines, who requested that her name not be used, said she came to the U.S. to work as a housekeeper for an ambassador from Africa more than three years ago. But as soon as she arrived in New Jersey, her employer seized her passport and work contract.</p>
<p>“The first thing that made me scared is they said their house is alarmed — if I open the door, the alarm will go off, and the police will arrive and take me away,” she said in her native Tagalog through an interpreter.<br>
The woman said her employer paid her $1,000 per month for working 17-hour days, threw a fork at her in a fit of anger and made her scrub the kitchen when she was ill. “I was so scared,” she said. “I was always nervous. I was feeling sick.”</p>
<p>With the help of the ambassador’s driver, she contacted the Damayan Migrant Workers Association, a nonprofit group in New York City, which helped rescue her.</p>
<p>She said finding work has been difficult, and potential employers fear her trafficking background. She now works as a part-time nanny, but the pay is not sufficient to support herself.</p>
<p>“In truth, it’s short,” she said. “Not enough. My part-time work is just enough for the housing. There’s no health insurance.”</p>
<p>Community groups say survivors run the risk of re-exploitation if they work in sectors that are not properly regulated.</p>
<p>“This is especially true in the domestic worker industry, but any kind of informal sector where people are kind of more hidden from sight,” said Cindy Liou, staff attorney and coordinator of the Human Trafficking Project at Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that provides legal services for victims.</p>
<p>“It’s not uncommon that some of our clients sometimes come back to us with wage-and-hour questions, and we refer them out to the Employment Law Center and other places usually so they know their rights,” Liou said.</p>
<h3>The benefits clock</h3>
<p>County, state and federal governments offer a variety of temporary benefits to help smooth the way to rehabilitation for victims of international human trafficking.</p>
<p>Victims granted a T visa or continued presence status — a short-term immigration status from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — receive certification from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to access public benefits at the same level as refugees.</p>
<p>Benefits typically last eight months, and include cash assistance, health care, food stamps, job training, English courses, transportation passes and other services.</p>
<p>Some states, such as California and New York, have approved short-term benefits to assist trafficking survivors in the process of qualifying for federal benefits.</p>
<p>The maximum benefit for single adult T visa clients in San Francisco is $422 per month, which includes a county supplement of $105, said Josef Bruckback, eligibility manager of the state’s welfare program CalWorks at the Human Services Agency in San Francisco. Clients with children receive benefits through CalWorks and are eligible for services for up to 48 months.</p>
<p>“The overarching problem is that once they time out of those benefits, they’re really left on their own,” said Denise Brennan, associate professor and chair of the department of anthropology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. “It’s a very short time frame. It’s not likely that they have built a social network that could fill in where the government support leaves off.”</p>
<p>Survivors generally find work in the same labor sector they worked in when they were trafficked, Brennan said, and it’s usually low-wage work, limiting their economic mobility.</p>
<p>“What I think is really quite concerning is that over time, some of the first T visa recipients who now have green cards are just treading water,” she said. “Just in the past six months, I’ve heard about some folks who have lost their jobs.”</p>
<h3>Hurdles in finding housing</h3>
<p>Trafficking survivors often have difficulty finding an economical place to live in the long term. Some migrate from shelters to transitional housing until they can secure an affordable room or apartment. Others find temporary accommodations by working as live-in nannies.</p>
<p>A 64-year-old woman, who requested that her name not be used because she feared her former captor, said she came to California from Peru because her brother-in-law offered her work as a nanny to take care of his granddaughter. But he made her cook, wash, clean, garden and do other domestic work for about 14 hours a day, and restricted her from getting in touch with her family, she said.</p>
<p>“He invited me to come over here with the promise of work, and that he would support me in everything, but it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t true,” she said in Spanish through an interpreter.</p>
<p>After he released her from his house more than a year later, she found work as a nanny for a family in the Bay Area, who provided a space for her to stay in their home. She said she has lived in low-income housing apartments and has worked low-wage jobs at stores and cafes in the region since then.</p>
<p>She now earns $11 an hour working at a chain supermarket and lives in a subsidized apartment with her son.</p>
<p>Community organizations that provide shelter and rehabilitation services for international trafficking victims say finding both short-term and long-term affordable housing is difficult, and without proper housing, they could be at risk for re-victimization.</p>
<p>At the Asian Women’s Shelter in San Francisco, case managers start looking for housing once the victim has stabilized and recovered from the trauma, said Hediana Utarti, the group’s community projects coordinator. For trafficking survivors in the process of applying for a T visa, they look for housing that meshes with the government benefits.</p>
<p>“It’s very, very tight, but we would look for a place where maybe they can share with other people,” Utarti said. “Usually we are able to find something like a live-in situation, like help with the elderly.”</p>
<p>Those situations often work as barter: trafficking survivors provide support for elderly people who give accommodations in return. Survivors sometimes find these work opportunities on their own through friends.<br>
While most of the time this type of arrangement works, employers have been known to abuse the trafficking survivors by making them do more work than they signed up for, or not giving any breaks during their shifts, Utarti said.</p>
<p>When this type of re-exploitation occurs, case managers advise the trafficking victims to talk about the situation with their employers. “If need be, then we’ll do intervention,” she said.</p>
<p>In San Francisco, case managers also work with the city to identify space in single-room occupancy hotels, and if the clients have children, they look for housing in transitional facilities, such as the Compass Clara House, Raphael House and Hamilton Family Center.</p>
<p>Clients can stay for up to three months, but the Asian Women’s Shelter provides extensions for clients unable to find housing, to ensure that they do not find themselves on the streets.</p>
<p>“If they end up in a homeless shelter, then they’re going to go back to the whole cycle again — re-abuse,” Utarti said. “And we don’t want to do that.”</p>
http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-08/without-long-term-support-human-trafficking-survivors-at-risk-of-re-exploitation#commentsHousingImmigrationWealth & povertyCivil & human rightsLabor & unionsCaliforniaHuman TraffickingAsian Pacific Islander Legal OutreachAsian Women's shelterjobsT visatraffickingThu, 30 Aug 2012 16:31:29 +00001432 at http://sfpublicpress.orgAmbika KandasamyComic: Obedience is the best weaponhttp://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-07/comic-obedience-is-the-best-weapon
<p><em style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: italic; font-size: 12px; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; "><strong style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: bold; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 16px; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; ">One woman’s true tale of human trafficking and rescue</span></strong></em></p>
<p>Human trafficking is largely seen as a problem overseas, but its rise in the U.S. has gone largely underreported. For its <a href="http://sfpublicpress.org/news/print-edition/spring-2012">Spring 2012 edition</a>, the San Francisco Public Press published a <a href="http://sfpublicpress.org/trafficking">special report on human trafficking</a> in the Bay Area. The report examined the financial and political challenges facing agencies that aid trafficking victims and prosecute perpetrators. As a follow-up to this report, renowned <a href="http://archcomix.com">cartoon artist Dan Archer</a> illustrated one woman’s story with a full-page cartoon in the <a href="http://sfpublicpress.org/news/print-edition/summer-2012">Summer 2012 edition</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://sfpublicpress.org/files/images/comics/obedienceisthebestweapon.jpg"><img alt="" src="http://sfpublicpress.org/files/news/dac.jpg" style="width: 490px; "></a></p>
<p><a href="http://sfpublicpress.org/files/images/comics/obedienceisthebestweapon.jpg">View full-size cartoon.</a></p>
http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-07/comic-obedience-is-the-best-weapon#commentsWealth & povertyCivil & human rightsSan FranciscoHuman TraffickingabuseCaliforniacomicsDan Archerforced laborhuman traffickingmexicosurvivorvictimWed, 11 Jul 2012 18:28:25 +00001396 at http://sfpublicpress.orgDan ArcherInfamous Berkeley human trafficking case’s long shadow: KALW News interviews reporter Viji Sundaramhttp://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-03/infamous-berkeley-human-trafficking-cases-long-shadow-kalw-news-interviews-reporter-vij
<p>The <a href="http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/how-an-infamous-berkeley-human-trafficking-case-fueled-reform">story of Lakireddy Balireddy</a> made international headlines in the early 2000s, but what happened in the decade since then was even more important, said reporter Viji Sundaram of New America Media and part of a <a href="http://sfpublicpress.org/trafficking">team project on human trafficking</a> in the Spring 2012 print edition of the San Francisco Public Press.</p>
<p>The case, involving a handful of girls who prosecutors said were forced into labor and sex, led to reforms such as California’s first anti-trafficking law in 2005, and a follow-up ballot initiative that’s gaining support this year.</p>
<p>Last week Sundaram sat down with KALW News host Holly Kernan to discuss her reporting on the history of efforts to battle human trafficking in the Bay Area and California.</p>
<p style="text-align: center; "><a href="http://kalw.org/post/investigation-exposes-human-trafficking-bay-area#.T2FFRP5-9gQ.twitter">LISTEN TO THE RADIO PROGRAM ON KALW</a></p>
<p>Part of the problem that made the Lakireddy case the rallying cry for more attention on human trafficking was the imbalance of power. Lakireddy was one of the richest landlords in Berkeley in the late 1990s. His prosecution for the transportation and abuse of girls from his native India exposed clear abuses of vulnerable young women.</p>
<p>“It must be total hell, because she probably has glimpses of how other people are living,” Sundaram said of one of the victims she profiled. “Unlike in the village, where, surrounding Lakireddy’s home, it is utter poverty. So she probably thinks that’s how it is. But here she sees people driving in fancy cars, enjoying so much freedom, being allowed to dress the way they want. They are forced to dress in a certain way. They are never given an opportunity to go to school, or improve their chances for a better life. And they’re also limited in communicating with their families back home. It must be, I think, nothing short of hell.”</p>
<p>Read full coverage of human trafficking in the <a href="http://sfpublicpress.org/news/spring-2012">San Francisco Public Press Spring 2012 print edition</a>, on sale at retail outlets around San Francisco and online at <a href="http://sfpublicpress.org/trafficking">sfpublicpress.org/trafficking</a>.</p>
http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-03/infamous-berkeley-human-trafficking-cases-long-shadow-kalw-news-interviews-reporter-vij#commentsImmigrationCivil & human rightsCrimePoliticsBerkeleyHuman Traffickinghuman traffickingKALW Newslakireddy balireddyNew America MediaViji SundaramMon, 19 Mar 2012 01:40:26 +00001287 at http://sfpublicpress.orgMichael StollCitizen petition claims more than 800,000 signatures for anti-trafficking ballot measurehttp://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-03/citizen-petition-claims-more-than-800000-signatures-for-anti-trafficking-ballot-measure
<p>A nearly three-year effort to put a strong anti-human-trafficking law before voters succeeded this week, organizers said, when they counted 873,000 signatures on their petition to put the&nbsp;proposed Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act on the November state ballot.</p>
<p>The citizen-led campaign to strengthen criminal penalties against people who traffic teenagers, children and immigrant laborers on the streets of California cities, and over the Internet, has been working on the issue since 2009, when some Fremont residents started a grassroots organizing effort.</p>
<p>In December, the Fremont-based California Against Slavery merged efforts with A Safer California Foundation, founded by a former Facebook security director, to push for the ballot measure for the third time. With 900 volunteers working in 54 counties, they said they had succeeded.</p>
<p>“We’re thrilled at the outpouring of support for the initiative,” said Daphne Phung, who in 2009 founded California Against Slavery after reading shocking news reports.&nbsp;“By supporting the CASE Act, Californians can take a stand and say that we won’t tolerate the sexual exploitation of women and children by human traffickers.”&nbsp;</p>
<p>Phung joined up with Chris Kelly of Palo Alto, who ran the Privacy, Safety and Security division of Facebook for four years. He started Safer California Foundation to try to stop online predators.</p>
<p>California is a hub of human trafficking, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with thousands of teenage girls, boys and immigrant laborers offered for sale by pimps and other abusers who control them.</p>
<p>The FBI has identified Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sacramento as high-trafficking cities.</p>
<p>Yet California’s existing human trafficking law, Section 236.1 of the California Penal Code, is weak, say many prosecutors. They often go after traffickers using other statutes, such as those for kidnapping or sexual assault.</p>
<p>Alameda County Assistant District Attorney Sharmin Bock, the county’s chief prosecutor on human trafficking cases, who has overseen about 180 cases, said the law has been a slap on the wrist to johns. But it is not very useful in prosecuting traffickers, in large part because it requires prosecutors prove the use of force, fraud or coercion.</p>
<p>“Most trafficking victims are tricked,” Bock said, particularly teenagers who are targeted for their vulnerability, then brainwashed by into believing they are loved.</p>
<p>The proposed ballot measure would amend the state trafficking law to no longer require that prosecutors prove force or coercion. It also would no longer allow johns to avoid charges using the defense that they did not know a woman they paid to have sex was a minor.</p>
<p>Phung enlisted Bock to write the portions of the ballot measure pertaining to law. Kelly wrote the portions concerning Internet activity.</p>
<p>Kelly, speaking this week on a Webinar to volunteers who had gathered signatures on the petition, said he had tried to get a bill before the Legislature to require people caught trafficking over the Internet to be listed on the state’s sex offender registry. Legislators did not take up his cause. So he decided to join Phung’s effort, going straight to voters.</p>
http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-03/citizen-petition-claims-more-than-800000-signatures-for-anti-trafficking-ballot-measure#commentsImmigrationCivil & human rightsCrimeElectionsLabor & unionsCommunity engagementCaliforniaHuman TraffickingA Safer California FoundationBarbara GradyCalifornia against slaveryCalifornians Against Sexual ExploitationCASE ActChris KellyDaphne Phunghuman traffickingprostitutionSharmin BockSat, 17 Mar 2012 03:00:17 +00001286 at http://sfpublicpress.orgBarbara GradyUnderstanding the Bay Area's human trafficking problem: KPFA News interviews reporter Jason Winshell http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-03/understanding-the-bay-areas-human-trafficking-problem-kpfa-news-interviews-reporter-jas
<p><iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="http://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F39766516&amp;show_artwork=true" width="100%"></iframe></p>
<p>The Public Press’ latest cover story, on California’s uncoordinated attack on the problem of human trafficking, has been picked up in a variety of media since the publication of the special team reporting project in the Spring 2012 edition: <a href="http://sfpublicpress.org/trafficking">“Force, Fraud Coercion: Human Trafficking in the Bay Area.”</a> The project was produced in collaboration with <a href="http://newamericamedia.org">New America Media</a> and <a href="http://eltecolote.org/content/">El Tecolote</a>, San Francisco’s bilingual newspaper.</p>
<p>Last week&nbsp;Public Press reporter Jason Winshell was interviewed on KPFA Radio by producer Anthony Fest. Winshell’s lead story showed that four years after a high-profile state task force issued a study, many of its recommendations for better laws, funding and coordination among agencies have yet to materialize.</p>
<p>In the KPFA interview, Winshell dispelled the widely held public perception that human trafficking is synonymous with international sex trafficking — crimes in which primarily women are promised jobs in the U.S. by shady human smugglers, only to find themselves forced to work as prostitutes in hidden brothels.&nbsp;Human trafficking is broader than that — the extraction of any kind of labor by force, fraud or coercion. Although immigrants are common targets of traffickers, U.S. citizens are trafficked as well, and trafficking need not involve crossing international borders.</p>
<p>Fest asked Winshell about a theme running through the Public Press stories: the lack of follow-up on calls for better coordination to address human trafficking by state officials. After the state task force published its 2007 detailed recipe for combating human trafficking, it disbanded without providing any blueprint for implementing the recommendations.</p>
http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-03/understanding-the-bay-areas-human-trafficking-problem-kpfa-news-interviews-reporter-jas#commentsGovernmentImmigrationCivil & human rightsCrimeLabor & unionsSan FranciscoCaliforniaHuman TraffickingAnthony FestJason WinshellKPFAlabor traffickinglaw enforcementsex traffickingWed, 14 Mar 2012 21:21:56 +00001280 at http://sfpublicpress.orgMichael StollWeak state law, lack of police savvy frustrate attorneys who prosecute traffickershttp://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/weak-state-law-lack-of-police-savvy-frustrate-attorneys-who-prosecute-traffickers
<p class="p1"><i>While California prosecutors mostly agree that the state’s human trafficking laws need strengthening, they also suggest that failure to recognize the crime itself remains a greater impediment in the fight.</i></p>
<p class="p3"><i>State law is still relatively new. Assembly Bill 22 of 2005 creates penalties specifically for human traffickers. But some attorneys say it has not been much help. A maximum jail time of eight years, coupled with the tough standard of proof regarding intent to traffic, has led prosecutors to pursue existing, related charges — pimping and pandering, forced imprisonment, etc. — to assure sufficiently tough convictions.</i></p>
<p class="p3"><span style="font-size: 18px; "><b>Some girls are tricked by pimps who call it love</b></span><span class="s1"><b>&nbsp;</b></span></p>
<p class="p3"><b><img alt="" src="/files/OMalley_web.jpg" style="width: 180px; height: 220px; "></b></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s2"><b>NANCY O’MALLEY //&nbsp;</b></span>Alameda County district attorney<br>
Since 2006, the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office has filed criminal charges in 180 cases originating from its human trafficking task force; those cases resulted in 140 convictions.</p>
<p class="p6">The majority of these cases were for sex trafficking, she said. Alameda County is just beginning to focus on labor cases, which are difficult to uncover because they are hard to pick out from the general underground economy.</p>
<p class="p6">But sex trafficking victims, especially minors, come with their own complexities that should be better addressed by law enforcement and legislation, O’Malley said. At first glance, a relationship between a young victim and a trafficker might start out looking consensual but then become unbalanced as the trafficker takes more control.</p>
<p class="p6">“Some of these kids tell us they thought they were going to be the trafficker’s girlfriend,” she said. “Part of the challenge with the law is that it doesn’t clearly define that the human trafficking can be the result of coercing the minor.”</p>
<p class="p6"><b style="font-size: 18px; ">Law should treat sex and l</b><b style="font-size: 18px; ">abor trafficking differently</b></p>
<p class="p1"><b><img alt="" src="/files/Khine_web.jpg" style="width: 180px; height: 220px; "></b></p>
<p><b>MARSHALL KHINE //&nbsp;</b>San Francisco DA’s Office<br>
Assembly Bill 22 of 2005 defines human trafficking in rather broad terms. It could be made more user-friendly for prosecutors by clarifying the difference between labor trafficking and sex trafficking, said Marshall Khine, assistant district attorney in San Francisco.</p>
<p class="p4">Blurring the two categories appears to have resulted in the law leaving out a sex offender registration requirement for those convicted of sex trafficking, he said. But a conviction of pimping and pandering of a minor under the age of 16 can result in a lifetime registration. A human trafficking conviction is also harder to get because a prosecutor must prove the alleged trafficker’s intent.</p>
<p class="p4">And even if convicted, the jail time for such an offender maxes out at eight years.</p>
<p class="p4">“The penalties don’t really add much, if anything, for having to prove more,” he said, adding that human trafficking “should be considered more serious than it is.”</p>
<p class="p4">Even when prosecutors are on their way to nailing down a solid conviction, a case can fall apart due to lack of victim cooperation, Khine said. Simply getting victims to testify can be challenging. Even if they are available as prosecutors build a case, there is no guarantee they will stick through it and remain cooperative.</p>
<p class="p4">“Often the difficulty is getting our victims in a stabilized position to have them testify,” Khine said. “We have a lot of victims in the marginalized sections of society. We don’t always have a way of tracking them.”</p>
<p class="p4"><b style="font-size: 18px; ">Workplace slavery too often goes unrecognized&nbsp;</b></p>
<p class="p1"><b><img alt="" src="/files/parker_web.jpg" style="width: 180px; height: 220px; "></b></p>
<p class="p1"><b>LYNETTE PARKER //&nbsp;</b>Community Law Center, Santa Clara University<br>
Just getting started on a case by finding and properly identifying human trafficking victims remains one of the largest roadblocks for prosecutors, said Lynette Parker, clinical supervising attorney for the Katharine and George Alexander Community Law Center, based at Santa Clara University.</p>
<p class="p4"><span class="s1">That is why law enforcement needs better and more consistent education on what a labor or sex trafficked victim looks like, said Parker, whose law center is part of the South Bay Coalition to End Human Trafficking.</span></p>
<p class="p4"><span class="s1">“New people come in and out of law enforcement agencies and it takes a while to be able to explain how everything fits,” she said. “When it’s for slavery, law enforcement doesn’t always see how they can respond, what their role is. Is it a crime they can respond to as opposed to something from the wage and hour division?”</span></p>
<p class="p4"><span class="s1">But of the roughly 45 trafficking cases her law center has dealt with, only a few involved sex trafficking. Labor trafficking, while less recognized, is a big problem in the Bay Area, Parker said. But getting the public to realize this has been a struggle.</span></p>
<p class="p4"><span class="s1">“It’s an education piece,” she said. “Most cases talked about in the media have been domestic or international sex trafficking. So it’s taken time and more cases being discussed and more training programs on what forced slavery looks like. I don’t think in this nation we really have an idea of how many people have been trafficked.”</span></p>
http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/weak-state-law-lack-of-police-savvy-frustrate-attorneys-who-prosecute-traffickers#commentsCivil & human rightsSan FranciscoHuman Traffickingalameda county district attorney's officekatherine and george alexander community law centerlabor traffickingsan francisco district attorney's officesanta clara universitysex traffickingworkplace slaveryWed, 29 Feb 2012 22:51:58 +00001249 at http://sfpublicpress.orgDhyana LeveyState labor agencies slow to coordinate with law enforcement on trafficking caseshttp://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/state-labor-agencies-slow-to-coordinate-with-law-enforcement-on-trafficking-cases
<p class="p1">Despite a strongly worded recommendation from a California-wide task force four years ago urging labor standards officials to look for signs of human trafficking, state and local investigators say there has so far been little coordination or direct follow-up with law enforcement or organizations supporting victims.</p>
<p class="p3">The task force, which was disbanded in 2007 but is reconvening throughout this spring, outlined the need to identify and rescue victims — as opposed to deporting them in the course of routine labor enforcement sweeps.</p>
<p class="p3">Representatives of the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement said they could not recall any recent cases in which a raid on a business for suspected violations of labor law led to a criminal investigation or prosecution for human trafficking. They also said they had not instituted a training program for state labor agents.</p>
<p class="p3">But California’s new labor commissioner Julie A. Su, who previously worked on some of the state’s most high-profile trafficking cases as an advocate at nonprofit organizations including Sweatshop Watch, said she intends to improve training of agents.</p>
<p class="p3">In 2010, the last year for which the state has reliable statistics, labor enforcement investigations of more than 13,000 businesses across the state yielded more than $2 million in fines on employers. That year several dozens of San Francisco Chinatown businesses drew attention for substandard working conditions. In raids that fall, the state labor standards office found 79 restaurants to be in violation of a variety of employment laws.</p>
<p class="p3">The raids followed a disturbing study of restaurant workers published by the Chinese Progressive Association and other groups. It found that 50 percent of workers received less than minimum wage, 20 percent worked more than 60 hours a week, 48 percent had experienced burn injuries, only 3 percent got employer-provided health care and 95 percent did not receive a San Francisco “living wage.”</p>
<p class="p3">Experts say human trafficking — the transportation and exploitation of workers through force, fraud or coercion — is hard to stop because it is so difficult to detect. Traffickers commonly conceal abuses of immigrant workers in plain sight, through intimidation and sometimes physical or sexual abuse. In some cases employers confiscate passports, threaten deportation, withhold wages, restrict movement or isolate victims from the community.</p>
<p class="p3">Dozens of such examples are documented in a 2007 report by the state task force, convened by the California Attorney General’s Office and the Crime and Violence Prevention Center on Human Trafficking. The report stressed that sex abuse was the tip of the iceberg in a much larger pool of trafficked and exploited labor.</p>
<p class="p3">In addition to training, the task force urged labor standards agencies across the state to “report such findings to their superiors for further investigation and service referral rather than potential deportation.”</p>
<p class="p3">Alden Pinkham, center program specialist and trainer for the National Human Trafficking Resource of the Polaris Project, which operates a 24-hour national call center, said isolation of immigrant workers from the rest of American society is a telltale sign of trafficking.</p>
<p class="p3">“One of the elements that would manifest when you work in a restaurant all day, and you live in housing provided by employers, and are transported from your work to your house, is that you have no meaningful opportunity to leave,” she said.</p>
<p class="p3">Another warning sign, according to Pinkham: Some employers charge for overseas transportation, so workers are perpetually indebted. Large debts for promised employment in the United States could be considered involuntary servitude, whether or not victims are even aware that they have been deceived or trafficked.</p>
<p class="p3">Workers’ lack of understanding of their own rights makes exposing such cases through labor violations difficult, but important.</p>
<p class="p3">Su, who was appointed as the California labor commissioner in April 2011, as a nonprofit organization advocate in 1996 worked on an infamous human trafficking case involving dozens of garment workers. In El Monte (Los Angeles County), 72 rural mostly female Thai workers were confined in apartment buildings, where they were forced to sew garments for less than $2 per hour, and worked for more than 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Their living quarters were infested with cockroaches and rats. Razor wire outside the compound deterred escape.</p>
<p class="p3">“Knowing that those are the kind of schemes they engage on,” Su said, “one of the priorities of mine and this administration is having in-depth investigations on site and off site. And off site is important because sometimes inside, workers are afraid to speak. So we specialize in doing quality inspections versus quantity inspections.”</p>
<p class="p3">Su said that developing a training program to help labor investigators recognize a broad range of criminal activity was her priority. She recently launched the Labor Commissioner’s Criminal Investigation Unit, made up of peace officers, which will help crack criminal trafficking cases related to labor law violations.</p>
<p class="p3">Su stressed the importance of having state labor investigators speak the language of the workers, scrutinizing payroll records, interviewing employers and making sure prospective workers recognize common scams. She said victims should understand that the state is on their side and that undocumented and trafficked workers will be helped, not deported.</p>
<p class="p3">“Immigrants should know that no matter how they arrived to the United States,” she said, “they do not check their humanity at the border.”</p>
http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/state-labor-agencies-slow-to-coordinate-with-law-enforcement-on-trafficking-cases#commentsCivil & human rightsCaliforniaHuman TraffickingSpring 2012california labor commissioner julie a. suChinese Progressive Associationcrime and violence prevention center on human traffickingthe polaris projectMon, 27 Feb 2012 19:42:07 +00001242 at http://sfpublicpress.orgAlejandra CuéllarCalifornia voter initiative would strengthen penalties for traffickershttp://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/california-voter-initiative-would-strengthen-penalties-for-traffickers
<p class="p1"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, sans-serif; "><em style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: italic; font-size: 12px; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; "><strong style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: bold; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; ">This special report appeared in the&nbsp;<a href="http://sfpublicpress.org/news/spring-2012" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: bold; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); text-decoration: none; ">Spring 2012 print edition</a>&nbsp;of the San Francisco Public Press.</strong></em></span></p>
<p class="p1"><br>
A&nbsp;California group dedicated to stopping human trafficking is hoping to take its fight directly to voters this fall.</p>
<p class="p3">In January, the nonprofit advocacy group <a href="http://californiaagainstslavery.org/">California Against Slavery </a>began circulating petitions to get a measure on the November 2012 ballot to strengthen the state’s human trafficking laws. The measure is called the Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act, and the campaign has mobilized hundreds of people around the state to collect the 800,000 valid signatures required for the measure to make the ballot.</p>
<p class="p3">Among the harsher penalties on traffickers and provisions to protect victims, the act would:</p>
<ul>
<li>Increase criminal penalties on human traffickers, require them to register as sex offenders and make them report private Internet access to law enforcement</li>
<li>Use criminal fines to support victim services</li>
<li>Require all police to undergo at least two hours of training on trafficking and how to treat victims</li>
<li>Prohibit evidence of a victim’s past sexual history from being used in a trafficker’s trial&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
<p class="p3">In 2009, Daphne Phung first learned about human trafficking in the United States from a TV documentary.</p>
<p class="p3">“I was shocked by the lack of justice,” said Phung, who went on to found California Against Slavery. “We first circulated the petition two years ago, when the organization started, but couldn’t get all the signatures in five months.”</p>
<p class="p3">The initiative is a joint effort. Authors include Sharmin Bock, who spent 23 years as a prosecutor in Alameda County, which the FBI has identified as a hotbed of domestic human trafficking. Chris Kelly, chief privacy officer and head of global public policy for Facebook, wrote the proposed law’s digital penalty. The <a href="http://www.polarisproject.org/">Polaris Project</a>, another anti-trafficking organization, reviewed the petition as well. Phung said more than 1,000 volunteers from across California have contributed to the campaign.</p>
<p class="p3">The effort to put this measure on the ballot has some skeptics.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p3">“One gentleman told me the CASE Act wouldn’t pass — voters wouldn’t continue overcrowding prisons,” said Robert Joeger, a filmmaker from Orange County who volunteered his time creating videos for the organization. “But it’s not just going to be funded by tax dollars.”</p>
<p class="p3">Some question the statistics the group has used to promote the cause. Much of the initiative was formed on the recommendations of a 2006 study that Phung now acknowledges was outdated. Last June <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/sex-trafficking/">The Village Voice </a>in New York criticized the methodology used to gather the statistics.</p>
<p class="p3">But backers of the initiative say they cannot wait for perfect studies.</p>
<p class="p3">“Trafficking victims don’t raise their hand,” said Sandra Morgan, director of the <a href="http://gcwj.vanguard.edu/">Global Center for Women and Justice</a> at Vanguard University, a Christian liberal arts college in Orange County. “No one with experience in this will give a flat number.” Morgan is also founder of Live2Free, a youth initiative against slavery and the former administrator of the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force, so she has seen many cases that don’t get officially counted.</p>
<p class="p3">“Some crimes related to human trafficking never show up in the statistics,” she said. “For example, it might have been prosecuted as a gang case.”</p>
<p class="p3">Morgan said more awareness is needed about labor trafficking and exploitation. “We find what we are looking for,” she said. “Sometimes immigrants fall through the cracks.”</p>
<p class="p3">Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley is worried about the scope and implementation of the new voter initiative.</p>
<p class="p3">“I’m leery of laws that come to us through initiative process,” O’Malley said, noting that once they are passed they are difficult to amend if found later to be flawed. “You can’t change the initiative.”</p>
<p class="p3">Others in the legal system don’t share her concerns.</p>
<p class="p3">“I’m not political, but anything that can help us fight against human trafficking is a step in the right direction,” said Holly Joshi, head of the Oakland Public Defender’s Office vice and child exploitation unit, which has five officers.</p>
<p class="p3">“We are struggling,” Joshi said. “It’s the second-fastest-growing crime in the country. This crime has really gotten ahead of us. It has reached epidemic proportions.”</p>
<p class="p3">Law enforcement, service professionals in the field and activists said deep budget cuts have hampered their efforts. Joshi’s unit has no safe place for victims to stay, except for juvenile hall. She told of a young, domestically trafficked girl who was released from custody in 2008 to return to her family. The girl returned to her pimp, who killed her.</p>
<p class="p3">Trafficking victims talk of negative experiences and a culture of distrust between them and law enforcement.</p>
<p class="p3">Leah Albright-Byrd recalled her arrest at age 15, when she was already a victim of human trafficking. She described the tight clasp of handcuffs and how the police officer said she “looked like a hooker.”</p>
<p class="p3">“I was treated like a criminal,” Albright-Byrd said. Had that officer known what kinds of questions to ask, Albright-Byrd might not have remained a victim of human trafficking for three more years after that arrest.</p>
<p class="p3">When she was 14 a pimp convinced her that abuse and exploitation would be inevitable parts of her life. He told her that she “might as well get paid for it.” She recounted how he used words like “love” and “protection” as weapons.</p>
<p class="p3">Today, Albright-Byrd is executive director of <a href="http://www.bridgetsdream.org/Home_Page.html">Bridget’s Dream</a>, a nonprofit dedicated to advocacy, prevention and victim services. She works with California Against Slavery as a speaker and educator.</p>
<p class="p3">Phung acknowledges that the two-hour police training the initiative requires would not by itself form bonds of trust with victims. “This is only the beginning of awareness,” Phung said.</p>
<p class="p3">Yet offering more training for law enforcement had dramatic results in Orange County, said Live2Free founder Morgan.</p>
<p class="p3">“They start to see cases that were there all along,” she said. “Now they are able to recognize and prosecute them.”</p>
http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/california-voter-initiative-would-strengthen-penalties-for-traffickers#commentsCivil & human rightsSan FranciscoHuman TraffickingSpring 2012bridget's dreamCalifornia against slaverycalifornians against sexual exploitation actCASE Actglobal center for women and justicenovember 2012 electionsex traffickingsexual slaverythe polaris projectFri, 24 Feb 2012 21:17:26 +00001246 at http://sfpublicpress.orgLeigh CuenHuman trafficking is a growing global scourgehttp://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/human-trafficking-is-a-growing-global-scourge
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">O</span>n the 900-mile trek of mostly desert that stretches between Eritrea and Egypt, hunting for humans has become routine.</p>
<p class="p3">Eritrean refugees who have fled their homeland fall prey to Bedouin or Egyptian traffickers. The refugees are held for ransom. Those with relatives abroad who can pay for their release might survive. Those who do not are often killed. The United Nations confirms that some are harvested for their organs — their livers and kidneys sold on the black market — while others, the young and able, are sold off.&nbsp; One survivor told the U.N., “People catch us, sell us like goats.”</p>
<p class="p3">Slavery is alive and well in the 21st century. There are more people enslaved today than at any other time in history. The <a href="http://www.state.gov/j/tip/">U.S. State Department </a>says that estimates of those enslaved through human trafficking ranges from 4 million to 27 million. &nbsp;</p>
<p class="p3">Human trafficking is the fastest-growing criminal business in the world, according to the State Department. It ranks only second to drug trafficking in profitability, bringing in an estimated $32 billion annually. The majority of those trafficked are young adults between ages 18 and 24 — but children also make up a large part of it. Almost all have experienced either sexual exploitation or violence, often both, during their time being enslaved.</p>
<p class="p3">But the statistics can be disputed. The United Nations notes that “the lack of accurate statistics is due only in part to the hidden nature of the crime, and that the lack of systematic reporting is the real problem.” In other words, the number of those trafficked worldwide might be far greater than what is estimated.</p>
<p class="p3">What we do know is that traffickers practice the trade with relative impunity. In 2006 there were 5,808 trafficking prosecutions and 3,160 convictions worldwide, which would mean that one person is convicted for every 800 people trafficked.</p>
<p class="p3">Though most of those trafficked are exploited for their labor and or are thrown into sexual servitude, the area that’s particularly grotesque is the organ trade. One human rights lawyer who did not want to give his name said cases involving the removal of human organs for transplantation are more miserable than those involving genocide.</p>
<p class="p3">“At one end someone is killed for their organs, which in some perhaps overly theoretical way is worse than murder,” he said. “In the latter, the victim’s death is at least a motive — the murderer seeks to kill a human being. In the former, the victim is merely a box containing an object, and the murder is merely the process of throwing out the box and wrapping.”</p>
<p class="p3">The international commodification of humans is becoming the new norm of our age. In Bangkok, Thailand, a “baby factory” was discovered last year in which more than a dozen Vietnamese women were impregnated (some were raped), and their babies were sold for adoption. Whether or not the babies — unregistered, non-existent in the eyes of the law — were truly adopted, raised to be slaves or farmed out for body parts is not known.</p>
<p class="p3">What is certain is that Vietnam, like many other impoverished countries with a growing population of young people, has become a major supply country, where vulnerable young women and girls are in high demand on the international market. In certain bars in Ho Chi Minh City, rural girls are routinely trucked in to parade at auction blocks. The girls are often naked except for a tag with a number on it, and in the audience are foreigners — South Koreans, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese are the main consumers — who call them down for inspection. They leave together under the pretense of marriage after the paperwork is done, but many end up in brothels or sweatshops instead.</p>
<p class="p3">Diep Vuong, executive director of <a href="http://pacificlinks.org/">Pacific Links Foundation</a>, an organization that works to combat human trafficking by providing education to the poor in Vietnam, is pessimistic. Overpopulated and dwindling in resources, Vietnam is full of young, uneducated people.</p>
<p class="p3">“The only resource we have left in abundance are the humans themselves,” she noted wryly. “We’re moving toward the Jonathan Swift version of reality.”&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p3">While children of the poor are not being eaten as Swift sarcastically suggested, they are being abducted and enslaved. They work in the fields as slave laborers as in the Ivory Coast’s cocoa plantation where half a million children work and provide 40 percent of the world’s chocolate — something most of them have never tasted. Or they are abducted at ages as young as 5 in Uganda and forced to become soldiers. Or they work in the carpet and brick factories of South Asia, many shackled and branded by their masters. Those too weak to work are killed off and thrown into rivers.</p>
<p class="p3">Closer to home, border drug cartels have incorporated the lucrative human trade into their business, and in some parts of Mexico they have the tacit support of the local authorities. Mass graves were discovered last year full of migrants’ corpses. Their crime: They weren’t worth much alive.</p>
<p class="p3">The forces of globalization have only intensified the trade in humans. After the Cold War ended, borders became more porous. New forms of information technology have helped integrate the world market. Increasing economic disparity and demand for cheap labor have spurred unprecedented mass human migration. The poor and desperate fall prey to the lure of a better life.</p>
<p class="p3">Nongovernmental organization workers who battle trafficking often describe victims as being “tricked.”</p>
<p class="p3">In March 2004, eBay shut down sales when it discovered that three young Vietnamese women were being auctioned off, with a starting bid of $5,400. Their photos were displayed. The “items” were from Vietnam and would be “shipped to Taiwan only.”</p>
<p class="p3">“I was browsing on the Internet and this guy kept trying to chat with me,” one Vietnamese teenager rescued from a brothel in Phnom Penh recounted. “There’s a coffee shop in Cambodia. He said I could make money over there.”</p>
<p class="p3">They crossed the border from Vietnam to Cambodia, and she soon became enslaved. She was saved in a police raid, just as the traffickers were planning to move her again. The madam “was waiting for more girls to show up to ship us to Malaysia,” she said. Her fake passport had already been made.</p>
<p class="p3">The trafficking network is sophisticated and well organized, and if the lure of money and a better life elsewhere becomes the entrapment of the poor and vulnerable, the abundance of cheap labor coupled with an atmosphere of impunity becomes the seduction for others to become traffickers.</p>
<p class="p3">“A slave purchased for $10,000 could end up making her owner $160,000 in profits before she dies or runs away,” Siddharth Kara noted in a talk on sex trafficking at the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University. In fact, a child in Vietnam can be bought for as little as $400.</p>
<p class="p3">Slavery is not going away because the agony of human enslavement remains largely invisible in the public discourse. It is just as shocking that Eritrean refugees are hunted nightly by traffickers as it is that their story remains hidden in darkness.</p>
http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/human-trafficking-is-a-growing-global-scourge#commentsCivil & human rightsHuman TraffickingSpring 2012Pacific Links FoundationRoberta Buffett Center for International Studies at Northwestern UniversitySiddharth KaraU.S. State DepartmentUnited NationsWed, 22 Feb 2012 19:28:57 +00001247 at http://sfpublicpress.orgAndrew LamU.S. visas help trafficking victims, if applicants can vault legal hurdleshttp://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/us-visas-help-trafficking-victims-if-applicants-can-vault-legal-hurdles
<p><em><span style="font-size:20px;">Chance for permanent residency, access to federal benefits hinge on cooperating with law enforcement</span></em></p>
<p class="p1">A&nbsp;special visa created 12 years ago to save thousands of victims of human trafficking and curb international human trafficking has been vastly underutilized.</p>
<p class="p3">Attorneys for rescued victims seeking residency protection say law enforcement agencies are often unwilling or slow to “certify” victims’ claims of having been brought to the U.S. to work by force, fraud or coercion.</p>
<p class="p3">Legal experts and social service providers in high-trafficking regions, including the San Francisco Bay Area, suggest that victims are placed in a dangerous dilemma: Promising to cooperate with an investigation could possibly help their visa cases, but it could also expose them and their families back home to retaliation.</p>
<p class="p3">One result is that victims only apply for a fraction of the visas available each year. Last year the government received one-fifth of its quota, and of the applications received nearly 23 percent were rejected.</p>
<p class="p3">Lawyers and service providers for trafficking victims said the lack of assistance from law enforcement slowed or derailed what they called deserving applications. In one case, a domestic servant who worked 16-hour days for no pay for years earned a T visa with the help of a crusading lawyer despite the lack of certification by federal law enforcement officials.</p>
<p class="p3">Created by the federal <a href="http://www.acf.hhs.gov/trafficking/about/TVPA_2000.htm">Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000</a>, the T-1 Nonimmigrant Status visa provides trafficking victims from foreign countries temporary legal status, with an opportunity to apply for permanent residency and access to federal benefits if they cooperate with law enforcement in the investigations of their traffickers. Minors and those unable to participate in investigations because of physical or psychological trauma are excused, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that adjudicates the visa applications.</p>
<p class="p3">Data supplied by the agency reveals that only a few hundred T visas have been issued each year since the program began, despite a yearly quota of 5,000 available. According to the agency, in the last fiscal year 557 T visa applications were approved and 223 were rejected.</p>
<p class="p3">The original federal trafficking law, authored by Rep. Christopher Smith, R-New Jersey, has been reauthorized three times, and revisions have included lowering the visa qualification standards and increasing services available to trafficking victims.</p>
<p class="p3">Scholars specializing in international human trafficking laws say the program is flawed because the help it offers victims is hinged on their willingness to assist in the investigations.</p>
<p class="p3">“It would be much better to have a system where your protections were not dependent on you giving evidence against the person who trafficked you, which is the case for children,” said Jacqueline Bhabha, director of research at Harvard University’s <a href="http://www.harvardfxbcenter.org/index.php">François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights</a>.</p>
<p class="p4"><b>Helping law enforcement</b></p>
<p class="p6">The T visa application encourages applicants to submit “primary evidence” of their cooperation, which consists of a law enforcement certification that they have agreed to support investigations of their traffickers.</p>
<p class="p3">Attorneys and social service providers who work with T visa applicants say obtaining the&nbsp; certification is often an impediment in the application process.</p>
<p class="p3">Zoraida Peña Canal was trafficked from Peru to be a domestic servant in Contra Costa County five years ago. Sacramento attorney Avantika Rao helped her obtain a T visa, even though she said she was unable to get certification from law enforcement.</p>
<p class="p3">Peña Canal entered the U.S. in July 2006 to live with and work for a Walnut Creek family. She was put to work from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. each day for no pay caring for two children and doing chores, though her employer assured her that she would be paid.</p>
<p class="p3">Rao said Peña Canal escaped with the help of three neighbors. She learned about Peña Canal’s case when she was working at <a href="http://techforpeople.net/~lrcl/">La Raza Centro Legal</a>, a San Francisco-based organization that provides legal services to immigrants and low-income people.</p>
<p class="p3">Rao said in an email that law enforcement denied the certification though her client was doing everything possible to cooperate in the investigation.</p>
<p class="p3">“Ms. Peña Canal and I met with law enforcement agents and the U.S. Attorney’s Office on at least a dozen occasions during which Ms. Peña Canal provided physical evidence as well as testimony with regards to the crime,” Rao said.</p>
<p class="p3">After a series of requests to the U.S. Attorney’s Office to supply the certification, she was notified in September 2008 that the office would not provide the document.</p>
<p class="p3">“I was absolutely devastated by their decision, especially because they implied that they did not trust my client and did not view her case as important,” Rao said.</p>
<p class="p3">She submitted the T visa application anyway, without the certification. The lack of certification, she said, places “a much higher burden on the victim’s advocate to insert more details and documents in the T visa application, all of which are potentially discoverable by counsel for the trafficker in a legal proceeding.”</p>
<p class="p3">Despite these hurdles, Peña Canal’s T visa application was approved in January 2009.</p>
<p class="p3">Peña Canal relocated to San Francisco, where she now can be legally employed. She works as a janitor at a San Francisco company, cares for seniors in their homes and cleans houses on a referral basis.</p>
<p class="p4"><b>Fear of retaliation</b></p>
<p class="p6">Government agencies denying certification for T visa applicants is a common theme. Hilary Chester, associate director of anti-trafficking services at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, said law enforcement officials stalled on signing the certification for a client who was trafficked from El Salvador.</p>
<p class="p3">“I think what still bothers me personally is this notion that so much weight is given to the law enforcement piece, and that there is this requirement that a person be willing to cooperate in the prosecution,” Chester said. “I think it’s slippery.”</p>
<p class="p3">Her client did receive a T visa — more than two years later.</p>
<p class="p3">Legal service providers said that in addition to the hassle of getting law enforcement’s blessing, trafficked individuals also fear that applying for the visa may subject their families back home to threats.</p>
<p class="p3">“I think the biggest concerns are not so much fear in reporting the trafficking or talking to law enforcement about what’s happened, but it is very scary to be in a situation where they may potentially have to confront their traffickers in court — and the fears of retaliation for family back home,” said Lynette Parker, clinical supervising attorney for the immigration program of the <a href="http://law.scu.edu/kgaclc/index.cfm">Katharine and George Alexander Community Law Center</a>, based at Santa Clara&nbsp;University.</p>
<p class="p1">“One of the biggest challenges for us is to identify NGOs on the ground in the home countries that can help give information and provide safety to the families,” she said, adding that many non-governmental organizations provide services to victims in coordination with U.S. groups.</p>
<p class="p1">Some clients are also apprehensive about going through with the investigations because of the stigma they and their families might face in their communities if U.S. investigators start asking questions abroad, as the FBI does occasionally.</p>
<p class="p1">Hediana Utarti, community projects coordinator at the Asian Women’s Shelter in San Francisco, said she had a case in which a family brought a young woman to the U.S. from Asia by promising her work as a cook and offering to send her to school. She said the woman did cook, but was also forced to participate in sex parties in the family’s home.</p>
<p class="p1">Utarti said that when the trafficking survivor applied for a T visa, law enforcement officials interviewed her, and they contacted her client’s siblings in her home country for the investigation.</p>
<p class="p1">“So it’s very scary for that person to have that situation where there are a lot of people talking about you,” Utarti said.</p>
<p class="p1">Steven Merrill, a supervisory special agent at the FBI’s San Francisco office, said agents sometimes travel to home countries of trafficked victims, but it is rare.</p>
<p class="p1">He said the hardest part for investigators in trafficking cases is that in many cases victims are unwilling to share their stories of victimization.</p>
<p class="p1">“There’s a variety of reasons why that may be, but that will always remain a difficulty from the FBI and any other law enforcement’s perspective in accomplishing our mission to put human traffickers — to convict them in court,” Merrill said.</p>
<p class="p2"><b>Success stories</b></p>
<p class="p4">In cases in which the T visa program works, it offers trafficking victims freedom to emerge from oppressive situations and live and work in the country.</p>
<p class="p1">A 63-year-old Bay Area woman who was trafficked from Peru to the U.S. by her brother-in-law said she was paid $80 every 15 days for working at his house in Los Angeles.</p>
<p class="p1">The woman, who requested anonymity for fear that her trafficker might track her down, said in an interview that she worked about 14 hours a day, seven days a week. She said he forbade her from contacting her family in Lima, Peru.</p>
<p class="p1">“They didn’t want me to answer the phone, they didn’t want me to call my children on the phone,” she said. “I would never receive a letter from my kids. Nothing. They didn’t want me to go to church either. I am Catholic, so I wanted to go every Sunday, but they didn’t want me to go to the street, leave the garden. They didn’t want me to go out at all.”</p>
<p class="p1">After fleeing the situation, she was helped by the attorneys at Santa Clara University to obtain a T visa, and she is now free to live and work in the U.S.</p>
<p class="p1">U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has sought to raise public awareness of the T visa program. Sharon Rummery, the agency’s spokeswoman in San Francisco, said her office has provided training nationwide to law enforcement, community-based organizations and the media, to explain the T visa and similar programs.</p>
<p class="p1">“We very much want people to know that the T is available, people to understand what it means to be trafficked,” she said. “Some people may not even know that they’ve been trafficked.”</p>
<p class="p2"><b>Overcoming isolation</b></p>
<p class="p4">Some human trafficking experts said that building a life in the U.S. after receiving a T visa is challenging for survivors because they feel isolated, and have trouble finding long-term housing and accessing victim services.</p>
<p class="p1">Denise Brennan, an associate professor and chair of the anthropology department at Georgetown University, said that in contrast to trafficking survivors, political and economic refugees tend to settle in communities where others from their communities are located.</p>
<p class="p1">“Generally speaking, refugees, they are not moving to a community completely alone,” Brennan said. “Formerly trafficked persons generally are resettled alone in communities that are not made up of formerly trafficked persons. In fact, no one would know that they were trafficked unless they told them.”</p>
<p class="p1">Some Bay Area advocates for trafficking survivors said that finding long-term housing after escaping is also problematic.</p>
<p class="p1">Mollie Ring, chief of programs at <a href="http://www.sagesf.org/">Standing Against Global Exploitatio</a>n, a nonprofit group that provides services to trafficking victims, said it is tough for her clients to find affordable housing in San Francisco after they leave short-term, transitional housing.</p>
<p class="p1">Victims, she said, face a dilemma: “A client sometimes leaves the Bay Area in order to find a reasonable quality of life. But that means that they are disconnected from services. So it’s some of the Catch-22 there.”</p>
http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/us-visas-help-trafficking-victims-if-applicants-can-vault-legal-hurdles#commentsImmigrationCivil & human rightsSan FranciscoBay AreaHuman TraffickingSpring 2012Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:58:23 +00001244 at http://sfpublicpress.orgAmbika KandasamyHow an infamous Berkeley human trafficking case fueled reformhttp://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/how-an-infamous-berkeley-human-trafficking-case-fueled-reform
<p><span style="font-size:20px;"><em>Advocates for increased prison terms say 10-year-old sex trafficking case changed conversation</em></span></p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, sans-serif; "><em style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: italic; font-size: 12px; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; "><strong style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: bold; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; ">This special report appeared in the&nbsp;<a href="http://sfpublicpress.org/news/spring-2012" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: bold; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); text-decoration: none; ">Spring 2012 print edition</a>&nbsp;of the San Francisco Public Press. (Read in Spanish at La Opiñon/Impremedia.&nbsp;<a href="http://www.impre.com/noticias/nacionales/2012/2/20/buscan-leyes-mas-fuertes-antit-295457-1.html" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: bold; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: georgia; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); text-decoration: none; ">Leer en español en La Opiñon/Impremedia</a>.)</strong></em></span></p>
<p>More than a decade after she was freed from a sex trafficking ring in Berkeley, one survivor still has nightmares about Lakireddy Balireddy.</p>
<p class="p3">“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night after I dream that he is lying next to me, or see someone taking me to him,” said the young woman, now in her late 20s, who agreed to an interview on the condition of anonymity. “I jump out of bed and turn on all the lights to make sure he’s not in the room.”</p>
<p class="p3">The media circus that resulted as the sex trafficking case broke in early 2000, with daily outraged headlines about Lakireddy’s “sex slaves,” started a statewide conversation that led directly to the passage in 2005 of Assembly Bill 22, California’s first law setting higher criminal penalties for human trafficking.</p>
<p class="p3">This year’s campaign to get tougher anti-trafficking laws on the November ballot as a voter initiative is the latest attempt to deal with what proponents call the unfinished business of legal reform.</p>
<p class="p3">Former Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, the chief sponsor of the 2005 state law, said the Lakireddy case “was confirmation of what the problem was,” and “was definitely on our minds” when she and colleagues in the Legislature drafted the law. The final version established human trafficking for forced labor or services as a felony, punishable by a sentence of 3, 4 or 5 years (depending on severity of the case) in state prison for trafficking of an adult, and a sentence of 4, 6 or 8 years for trafficking of a minor.</p>
<p class="p3">The law also provides for monetary restitution and allows trafficking victims to bring civil actions against traffickers.</p>
<p class="p3">It might seem like a potent tool, but Lieber said tougher laws are needed.</p>
<p class="p3">The new initiative, a reform that proponents are calling the Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act, would extend prison terms and allow fines of up to $1.5 million for human traffickers. It would also require training for law enforcement, something that could have helped police detect the sex trafficking ring much sooner, said San Francisco attorney Michael Rubin of the law firm Altshuler Berzon LLP, who represented some of Lakireddy’s victims in a 2002 civil suit.</p>
<h3><b>An accidental death</b></h3>
<p class="p6">In 2001, federal law enforcement officials convicted the then 64-year-old restaurateur and real estate tycoon — one of Berkeley’s richest landlords, who raked in at least $1 million a month from his 1,000 or more rental properties — of two counts of transportation of minors for illegal sexual activity. He was also convicted of conspiracy to commit immigration fraud and filing a false tax return.</p>
<p class="p3">A federal investigation also found that Lakireddy had been “carrying out a widespread conspiracy since 1986 to bring at least 25 Indian laborers into the United States through false pretences,” according to a March 2001 Department of Justice statement. The immigrants were brought from his native village of Velvadam in southern India.</p>
<p class="p3">The sexual abuse of the girls began years earlier in the village and continued after he trafficked them into the United States, prosecutors said.</p>
<p class="p3">“He turned Berkeley into a Velvadam-by-the-Bay,” Rubin said.</p>
<p class="p3">In addition to subjecting the trafficked girls to what federal prosecutors called “sexual servitude,” Lakireddy allegedly forced many of them to work in his downtown Berkeley Indian restaurant, and do cleaning and maintenance work on his rental properties. He justified not putting them on payroll, or paying them very little, by saying he provided them free food and accommodation. Few of the girls were sent to school.</p>
<p class="p3">The abuse might have gone undetected even longer but for a carbon monoxide leak in November 1999 in one of his Berkeley apartments that killed Chanti Pratipatti, 17, whom he had trafficked months earlier. She and her 15-year-old sister had been brought to the country by two of Lakireddy’s relatives who masqueraded as their parents, and were siblings themselves.</p>
<p class="p3">Lakireddy was arrested on Jan. 14, 2000, two days before his planned departure to his native land with one of his trafficked victims.</p>
<p class="p3">A March 7, 2001, Department of Justice press release said Lakireddy might face up to 38 years in prison under a plea deal he struck with prosecutors. But that April, before he could be sentenced, his attorneys managed to bargain it down to a 97-month term. Lakireddy also agreed to pay $2 million in restitution to the surviving sister, her parents and an 18-year-old girl who was living with the sisters at the time of the accident.</p>
<p class="p3">Lakireddy spent a little less than eight years in Lompoc federal prison. After his release in 2008, he registered as a California sex offender.</p>
<p class="p3">Asked why the real estate tycoon received so much lighter a punishment than originally threatened, the two main prosecutors declined to comment. The presiding judge did not return several phone calls seeking comment.</p>
<h3><b>‘Creative’ ways to sue</b></h3>
<p class="p6">Anti-trafficking activists said the legal reforms that later made prosecutions easier coincided with growing public awareness about the problem of human trafficking — transporting people for labor through force, fraud or coercion.</p>
<p class="p2">“Until 2000, nobody knew what human trafficking was, what the term meant,” said Cupertino-based Kavitha Sreeharsha, executive director of Global Freedom Center, a recently launched nonprofit organization that fights trafficking worldwide.</p>
<p class="p1">Sreeharsha, who has been at the forefront of women’s rights for nearly 20 years as a lawyer and activist, said the case of the notorious Berkeley landlord was a game changer. It “galvanized” victim assistance providers in the Bay Area and ultimately served as “the building block for the state’s anti-trafficking movement.”</p>
<p class="p1">But when Rubin filed the civil lawsuit against Lakireddy, he did not have the benefit of the state’s anti-trafficking laws. Nor could he apply any of the provisions of the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the nation’s first anti-trafficking law enacted in 2000.</p>
<p class="p1">“When we filed the civil suit, federal law did not yet provide civil action for victims of sex and labor trafficking,” Rubin said.</p>
<p class="p1">The federal act strengthened criminal sanctions for forced labor, mandated that victims receive social and legal support and gave victims the right to remain in the United States if they cooperated with law enforcement. But that was only for federal cases. California prosecutors would wait another five years for the state’s own anti-trafficking law.</p>
<p class="p1">Rubin had to base his case on other laws. He said he thought the victims had not received justice in the criminal case, and that they should be compensated for the harm done to them.</p>
<p class="p1">“We had to pursue our lawsuit in a very creative way,” Rubin said. “We had to develop new theories because there were no applicable anti-trafficking statutes back then.”</p>
<p class="p1">The civil complaint, filed in Alameda County Superior Court in Oakland, accused Lakireddy of “slave labor,” “false imprisonment,” and “infliction of emotional distress,” among other claims. The allegations of the civil complaint also accused Lakireddy of having raped the women he trafficked.</p>
<p class="p1">The complaint also included claims brought under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization, or RICO, statute. Filed on behalf of nine alleged victims of the Lakireddy clan, the lawsuit sought up to $100 million in damages.</p>
<p class="p1">In the complaint, Rubin accused the defendants of exploiting the victims’ “youth, their fear, their caste status, their poverty, their unfamiliarity with the American legal system, their inability to speak English, and their immigration status” for the defendants’&nbsp; “personal pleasure” and “illicit profit.”</p>
<p class="p1">The class-action lawsuit resulted in an $8.9 million settlement in June 2004.</p>
<p class="p1">Lakireddy Balireddy did not act alone to mistreat the women he brought to America. He had help from several members of his family, prosecutors discovered.</p>
<p class="p1">Five members of Lakireddy’s family were also implicated by law enforcement in various aspects of his criminal activities. His sons, Vijay Kumar Lakireddy and Prasad Lakireddy, were indicted in 2001 on several counts of rape and conspiring with their father for more than a decade to smuggle women and girls into the U.S. to have sex with them, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. In an agreement with prosecutors, the most serious charges were dropped and Vijay Kumar Lakireddy&nbsp; pleaded guilty to immigration fraud conspiracy. He was sentenced to two years in prison and agreed to undergo drug treatment and pay $40,000 in fines. Lakireddy Balireddy’s brother and sister-in-law were also convicted of related crimes.</p>
<p class="p1">Beyond the criminal case, Rubin’s civil suit also brought in several other relatives as defendants.</p>
<h3><b>Influence in Indian village</b></h3>
<p class="p4">The Lakireddy trafficking saga revealed elements of feudalism and casteism that clashed with American cultural and social norms. Those factors made it complicated to address what prosecutors and lawyers in the U.S. saw as a broader trafficking operation.</p>
<p class="p1">In Velvadam, an agrarian village of about 8,000 in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, Lakireddy’s immense wealth — his Berkeley properties alone are worth an estimated $60 million — and his long ties to America earned him both respect and fear.</p>
<p class="p1">Western journalists who descended on the village soon after his arrest were surprised by the extent of his power among locals. Minutes after reporters entered the village, banners went up on buildings. One read: “Lakireddy Is Our God. Leave Him Alone.” Another declared: “Lakireddy Is Innocent.”</p>
<p class="p1">Lakireddy used his inherited and earned wealth to launch several philanthropic ventures. Starting in the mid-1980s, he built two elementary schools and a high school in Velvadam. The state-of-the-art Lakireddy Balireddy College of Engineering, opened in 1998, lent a certain cachet to the neighboring township of Mylavaram. He also created new sources of clean drinking water. Bus shelters sport the Lakireddy name.</p>
<p class="p1">Many of the girls he was accused of exploiting belonged to the so-called untouchable communities, their parents barely making $1 a day from menial jobs. Most lived in one-room thatched-roof houses.</p>
<p class="p1">Prosecutors said during his criminal case in U.S. District Court in Oakland Lakireddy convinced villagers that an American lifestyle was within their grasp if they just gave him their young daughters. Many obliged, including the parents of the two sisters who had lived in the Berkeley apartment where the fatal gas leak occurred.</p>
<p class="p1">The girls’ older sister had already been married off when the two younger sisters went to live with Lakireddy. “We couldn’t have afforded the kind of dowry we paid for our older daughter,” explained their mother, Lakshmi Pratipatti, in an interview in Velvadam in 2000. She said she and her husband felt that sending two of the daughters off to the United States with Lakireddy would save them a fortune.</p>
<p class="p1">The two sisters, like nearly all the other girls, had ostensibly been recruited to work as servants in his opulent three-story home in Velvadam that sat on a beautifully landscaped two-acre plot. Behind those walls, they also worked as his sex slaves, Rubin’s civil lawsuit alleged, something that some trafficked victims said their parents must have known would happen.</p>
<h3><b>Victims still uneasy</b></h3>
<p class="p4">“I was given to him when I was nine,” one trafficked woman said, adding: “The day I was given to him, my childhood ended and my misery began.”</p>
<p class="p1">Lakireddy “was unimaginably wealthy, all-powerful and in apparent full control of the world in which they were brought to live,” prosecuting Assistant U.S. Attorney John Kennedy said in court papers during the criminal proceedings.</p>
<p class="p1">The Lakireddy case may have led to California’s first anti-trafficking law, but reform advocates say its longer-term aftermath is less heartening. Victims and lawyers say the Lakireddy case continues to haunt its victims.</p>
<p class="p1">Even as the momentum grows to combat trafficking in the state, the survivors have been unable to find peace of mind. More than a decade after she was rescued, one young woman still needs to take sleeping pills to help her cope with flashbacks.</p>
<p class="p1">Meanwhile, Lakireddy Balireddy, now 75, roams freely in his village, which he visits twice a year, and continues to enjoy the admiration of many of those around him, according to his brother, Lakireddy Hanimireddy, a cardiologist who lives in Merced.</p>
<p class="p1">“He has the 100 percent respect of the people of Velvadam,” the brother said. “His overwhelming good deeds and not his bad deeds are what earn him so much respect.”</p>
http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/how-an-infamous-berkeley-human-trafficking-case-fueled-reform#commentsCivil & human rightsBay AreaCaliforniaHuman TraffickingSpring 2012californians against sexual exploitation actfederal traffficking victims protection actglobal freedom centerlakireddy balireddylakireddy balireddy college of engineeringSally Liebersex slavesvelvadamThu, 16 Feb 2012 18:43:54 +00001243 at http://sfpublicpress.orgViji SundaramBay Area agencies improvise tactics to battle traffickinghttp://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/bay-area-agencies-improvise-tactics-to-battle-trafficking
<p class="p1"><span style="font-size:20px;"><em>With little guidance from state leaders, local police, nonprofits fight for scarce funding</em></span></p>
<p class="p1">Across California, local agencies have been left to scramble for limited resources and improvise strategies to fight human trafficking, a problem whose scope has yet to be defined with reliable numbers.</p>
<p class="p3">A high-profile state task force studying California’s human trafficking problem made 46 recommendations in October 2007 to reform criminal law, improve training, coordinate among agencies and provide better victim services. But the group did not set up mechanisms to monitor progress.</p>
<p class="p3">The task force disbanded shortly after releasing its report. Attorney General Kamala Harris, who represented San Francisco when she was district attorney, has begun picking up the pieces this year. In February she reconvened the panel in Sacramento to assess the remaining challenges. An updated report is due this spring.</p>
<p class="p3">Without clear guidance from the state, nine regional task forces have sprung up in California to devise their own solutions. Their efforts have been supported mostly by federal grants. But as the funding rules become more stringent, the groups at times have been pitted against each other for resources.</p>
<p class="p3">“We’re competing for a shrinking pool of money,” said Lt. Jason Fox, leader of the San Francisco police’s human trafficking unit. “We’re competing with jurisdictions that are absolutely broke.”</p>
<p class="p3">Bay Area agencies say they are doing the best they can. Nonprofit organizations say they cannot provide services to all the victims who come forward. Without adequate training and coordination, police departments often default to what they are trained to do — routine public safety, not investigations of international organized crime.</p>
<p class="p3">As recently as last June the San Francisco Police Department got permission to use a portion of a human trafficking grant to <a href="http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2011-11/after-anti-trafficking-team-shifted-focus-to-prostitution-arrests-police-retool-investi">arrest 41 prostitutes </a>in the Polk Gulch neighborhood in response to residents’ complaints.</p>
<p class="p3">Then in October, the department lost out on a critical <a href="http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/BJA/grant/11BJAOVC_HumanTraffickingSol.pdf">half-million-dollar grant</a> to add staff for long-term investigations and victim support, increase training, direct more resources to labor trafficking and create an office at San Francisco International Airport, where local police would work with federal investigators to uncover international human trafficking schemes.</p>
<p class="p3">The grant went instead to the San Jose Police Department, which outlined a detailed plan, cited its record of 60 investigations — some in collaboration with federal law enforcement — and extensive outreach and training programs.</p>
<p class="p3">San Francisco’s application, while ambitious, cited few investigative accomplishments in recent years, federal grant reviewers wrote. It was vague on goals, and revealed that the police department placed human trafficking investigations in its prostitution-focused vice crimes unit, an indication that it had neglected labor trafficking.</p>
<p class="p3">San Francisco’s loss of the grant highlights a problem across California, which experts say has seen high numbers of trafficking cases compared with most other states. But reliable numbers are hard to come by. Even some high-level collaborative anti-trafficking operations rely on exaggerated, unscientific estimates of the scale of the problem, say researchers in government, advocacy organizations and academe.</p>
<p class="p3">In a 2008 study of the 13 worst afflicted regions of the country, California accounted for 26 percent of federal prosecutions for human trafficking. Local law enforcement and victim service providers identify the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego as hubs. Traffickers take advantage of these cities’ immigrant and ethnic enclaves, the southern border with Mexico and convenient travel connections to the Pacific Rim and Latin America.</p>
<p class="p3">The sparse statistics notwithstanding, the U.S. State Department in 2009 sketched out a possible trend, tied to the current recession: Worsening economic conditions abroad have contributed to an increase in worldwide slavery and debt bondage. People who come to the U.S. illegally in search of work are more likely to become victims of traffickers than in the past.</p>
<p class="p3">“They’re being brought in from countries where there is no economic future for them,” said Robert Uy, a former staff attorney for Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach, a victim-services agency in San Francisco.</p>
<p class="p1">"In places like the Philippines, he said, the average wage is $150 a month. “And guess what, there’s huge amounts of unemployment, so most people make even less than that. They make like $30 a month.”</p>
<p class="p1">Immigration policy has worsened the situation, he added: “We’ve made it so damn difficult to get into the country now that people have to pay people to bring them in, or go to the shady recruiters who will promise them status.”</p>
<p class="p2"><b>FEDERAL ASSISTANCE</b></p>
<p class="p4">Nationwide the anti-trafficking movement is picking up steam. The federal government has funded 45 regional task forces across the country since 2004. Most of the focus is on sex trafficking, particularly the commercial sexual exploitation of minors. The Department of Justice <a href="http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/crm/trafficking_newsletter/tvpaanniversaryreport.pdf">reported </a>that as of October 2009, these regional task forces, along with activist groups and nonprofits “rescued over 891 children from commercial sexual exploitation and produced over 500 convictions in state and federal court, according to FBI statistics.”</p>
<p class="p1">In 2010, the Federal Bureau of Justice Assistance provided $3.75 million in federal stimulus grants administered by the California Emergency Management Agency to nine regional task forces in the state, three of them in the Bay Area: San Francisco, San Jose and Alameda County.</p>
<p class="p1">The grant language defined goals broadly, such as “Decrease the demand for human trafficking” and “Increase the number of individuals arrested for human trafficking.” They did not dictate approaches or set deadlines for meeting the goals, so the task forces were able to report routine policing operations as progress against human trafficking.</p>
<p class="p1">The San Francisco vice crimes unit reported the arrests of “johns” as human trafficking offenders. The unit also got permission to repurpose some of the grant money for prostitution street sweeps last summer in the Polk Gulch area, arresting dozens of prostitutes in response complaints. While neither action violated the guidelines, it departed from the original intent of the grant: to pursue long-term investigations.</p>
<p class="p2"><b>NEW STANDARDS</b></p>
<p class="p4">After a review last year of task forces nationwide, the Bureau of Justice Assistance laid out stringent new standards for grantees to make local agencies more effective and accountable. Trafficking investigations could no longer be run out of vice squads, whose role traditionally has been investigating prostitution. Nor could investigators over-emphasize sex; the less recognizable problem of labor trafficking in all its forms must also be tackled.</p>
<p class="p1">In retrospect, San Francisco’s failure to get the new half-million dollar grant could have been foreseen: Its grant application followed years of work in which successes focused largely on raids at brothels, massage parlors and other sex-related businesses.</p>
<p class="p1">The highest-profile success of the San Francisco police to date was <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/07/02/MNGDLDIDVD1.DTL">Operation Gilded Cage</a>. After a nine-month investigation local officers and FBI agents busted a network of massage parlors where more than 100 women, many of them Korean immigrants, had been forced into prostitution. The stings, which targeted 10 suspected brothels in San Francisco, were the inspiration for a 2005 series in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Diary of a Sex Slave.”</p>
<p class="p1">Since then, however, the department has been slow to build investigative capacity or training. Currently each officer receives just a half-hour of training every two years. Last fall Police Chief Greg Suhr reformed the human trafficking team, relocating two dedicated investigators to a <a href="http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2011-10/san-francisco-police-department-overhauls-special-victims-unit">newly reorganized </a>special victims unit.</p>
<p class="p1">Until recently, there have been few labor trafficking investigations. No labor-related cases have ever been referred to Assistant District Attorney Victor Hwang, who was specifically assigned that duty by the police department in September 2009.</p>
<p class="p1">However, in early 2012 the police said they uncovered a major international labor trafficking case involving multiple victims throughout the Bay Area. They said it involved trafficking across state and international borders. Out of concern of jeopardizing active investigations and prosecutions, the police said they could not yet reveal certain details from the case.</p>
<p class="p1">The scale of the arrests and prosecutions were too big for San Francisco police to handle. The case was turned over to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Federal agents have made arrests in early February, said Fox of the San Francisco police. “We gave it to the feds because they have resources we don’t have,” Fox said.</p>
<p class="p2"><b>SEX VS. LABOR</b></p>
<p class="p4">Federal law enforcement agencies such as Homeland Security Investigations, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office are more likely take on labor trafficking cases because of the resources, time, experience and training needed to successfully investigate and prosecute them.</p>
<p class="p1">Last year the Department of Justice <a href="http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/cshti0810.pdf">reported</a> that in more than 2,500 suspected cases of human trafficking, 56 percent of labor-related investigations included a federal agency — versus 23 percent for sex trafficking. Federal agencies were four times more likely to take the lead in labor trafficking cases.</p>
<p class="p1">In a high-profile <a href="http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/crime/2011/06/italian-consulate-worker-and-wife-accused-holding-slave?utm_source=feedburner+sfexaminer%2FLocal&amp;utm_medium=feed+Local+News&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sfexaminer%2FLocal+%28Local+News%29feed&amp;utm_content=feed&amp;utm_term=feed">labor trafficking case</a> last June, an employee of the Italian Consulate in San Francisco, Giuseppe Penzato, and his wife, Kesia Penzato, were arrested, accused of keeping a Brazilian woman in domestic servitude. Accounts of the case made headlines. The victim was rescued and her traffickers charged.</p>
<p class="p1">What was not revealed at the time was that the case took more than a year of work by Homeland Security Investigations, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and local nonprofit victim service providers.</p>
<p class="p1">The case was brought to federal officials in April 2010 by Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach, which had been helping the victim since she fled the couple’s home in late 2009.</p>
<p class="p1">Lori K. Haley, a spokeswoman for Homeland Security Investigations, said the case was brought to another government agency less than nine months earlier, but would not specify which agency that was.</p>
<p class="p1">Special Agent Jennifer Alderete, the initial investigator on the case, who interviewed the victim several times, said the critical element was keeping the woman engaged and cooperating.</p>
<p class="p1">The victim’s nonprofit advocates and those at another agency, Standing Against Global Exploitation, found the woman shelter and worked with immigration authorities to allow her to remain in the country.</p>
<p class="p1">Alderete said providing victims with social, medical, legal and immigration services from the moment of rescue helps build successful prosecutions.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p2"><b>SENTENCING CONTROVERSY</b></p>
<p class="p4"><a href="http://www.centerwomenpolicy.org/programs/trafficking/map/statelist.cfm?linktype=1">Forty-four states</a> have felony human trafficking laws. Prison time ranges from less than 10 years to life in prison. California Assembly Bill 22 of 2005 provides a maximum eight years in prison for trafficking a minor. For the same crime, federal law (authorization for which expired last September) prescribed a sentence of 15 years to life.</p>
<p class="p1">The shorter maximum sentence has led many prosecutors in California to use other charges — kidnapping, domestic violence, child sexual assault and extortion — to increase sentences to as much as life in prison.</p>
<p class="p1">Alameda County Assistant District Attorney Sharmin Bock, who has more than 20 years of experience prosecuting sex offenders, criticized the current law.</p>
<p class="p1">“All you can get is the max, eight years,” she said. “So if you’re the trafficker, what are you going to do? You’re going to go to trial. But if you charge extortion, what’s the penalty? Life. Do you think he is going to roll the dice?”</p>
<p class="p1">But providing tools for prosecutors is not the only concern of the Legislature.</p>
<p class="p1">Overcrowding in prisons has hampered the state’s anti-trafficking agenda. Since a federal court ordered the state to reduce prison populations in 2010, lawmakers have been allergic to passing any laws that put offenders in jail longer.</p>
<p class="p1">Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley said she tried to get the trafficking law amended in 2011 to broaden the definition of human trafficking. “But right now, any bill with punishment attached doesn’t get out of committee,” she said. “No one wants to add more people to the prison rolls.”</p>
<p class="p1">The 2005 human trafficking law, authored by then-Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View, included criminal provisions. Lieber said senators opposed it because it would add more felonies to the state’s complicated code without considering the impact on public safety and correctional resources. They preferred comprehensive sentencing overhaul to a piecemeal approach.</p>
<p class="p1">Then-Assemblyman (and now state Senator) Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, supported the bill, but warned that it would not pass with felony provisions.</p>
<p class="p1">“We were thinking it would be great to get twice what we asked for — 16 years,” Lieber said. “But we knew that there was no way that was going to fly.”</p>
<p class="p1">Lieber said she encountered opposition from several Republicans, including Tom McClintock — then a state senator, now a member of Congress — and former assemblymen Ray Hanes and Tim Leslie.</p>
<p class="p1">Some senators objected to providing legal protections to victims who entered the country illegally. “We had a lot of people making comments in committee of ‘Well, if people game the system by trying to get here through these traffickers, then they deserve what they get,’” Lieber said.</p>
<p class="p1">Although criminal penalties in the state’s anti-trafficking law have not increased, other laws have been created or amended that provide more support and protection for victims:</p>
<p class="p6">•Police now must exercise “due diligence,” and assess victims of domestic violence or rape for indications of human trafficking.</p>
<p class="p7">•It is now a misdemeanor to reveal the location of shelters for victims of domestic violence or human trafficking.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p7">•The addresses of sex abuse victims cannot be revealed by law enforcement.</p>
<p class="p7">•The law no longer requires that coercion be proved in cases involving minors.</p>
<p class="p7">•Debt-bondage contracts are now illegal.</p>
<p class="p7">•Domestic workers now receive labor law protections.</p>
<p class="p7">•Foreign victims of trafficking can receive social services while qualifying for a federal human trafficking T visa.</p>
<p class="p7">•Criminal fines and any profits from human trafficking go to the state Victim-Witness Assistance Fund.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p2"><b>POOR STATISTICS</b></p>
<p class="p4">It remains difficult to measure the scope of human trafficking because reliable large-scale studies are lacking. The 2007 state task force recommendations included the creation of a system for collecting data from state and federal law enforcement and prosecutors.</p>
<p class="p1">But when asked for human trafficking prosecution statistics, Attorney General’s Office spokeswoman Rebecca MacLaren said the agency does not track the data. Some data are maintained by the counties themselves, although the quality of the information varies widely.</p>
<p class="p1">Alameda County keeps a full accounting of cases in which human trafficking charges are filed, back to January 2006. Records provided to the San Francisco Public Press by the Alameda District Attorney’s Office for cases that included at least one human trafficking offense show 113 people charged under that law in the last six years. Of those, 39 were convicted of human trafficking and 28 on other charges. More than 20 defendants await a resolutions or verdicts. And the pace of cases is accelerating; more than half entered the court system since 2010.</p>
<p class="p1">During that time the work of the office’s trafficking task force led to the filing of a variety of criminal offenses in a total of 180 cases, which led to 140 convictions.</p>
<p class="p1">San Francisco’s data is minimal, though it is not clear whether this is due to&nbsp; poor record-keeping or the lack of arrests and prosecutions. The police began tracking basic human trafficking data in 2010 through its domestic violence unit. In response to a public records request, the department produced records of one prosecuted human trafficking case in 2010 and two in 2011, though it was only from one division. Other parts of the department might have records of additional cases but they could not be found.</p>
<p class="p1">Nationwide, experts disagree even on the order of magnitude of the human trafficking problem.</p>
<p class="p1">Last June <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-06-29/news/real-men-get-their-facts-straight-sex-trafficking-ashton-kutcher-demi-moore/">The Village Voice</a>, a weekly newspaper in New York, concluded that frequently quoted statistics are inflated and based on questionable methodologies. It singled out one of the most commonly cited statistics — that an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 children are “at risk” for, or are, being sexually exploited each year in the U.S. They traced the statistic back to the work of two University of Pennsylvania professors. But statisticians who reviewed their methodology found significant flaws.</p>
<p class="p1">The newspaper turned to a federal report that concluded that of 45 surveyed regional task forces, only 18 kept paperwork accurate enough to provide meaningful numbers. Adjusting for the holes in the data, the paper concluded, documented cases of trafficked children would be only about 250 per year. Somewhere between that number and hundreds of thousands lies the truth.</p>
<p class="p1">The newest effort to reform California trafficking laws has also leaned on the questionable statistics.</p>
<p class="p1">A citizen drive to get an initiative on the November 2012 ballot, called the Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act, would among other tough penalties provide for sentences of up to life in prison for trafficking a minor, and fines as high as $1.5 million.</p>
<p class="p1">Daphne Phung, founder of California Against Slavery, the organization sponsoring the initiative, removed the “100,000 to 300,000” statement from the initiative’s <a href="http://www.caseact.org/case/faq/">website </a>after the San Francisco Public Press pointed out the methodology questions.</p>
<p class="p1">Phung said the real challenge for the anti-trafficking movement is educating voters that it exists in the United States.</p>
<p class="p1">“I think it’s really a mental block for voters — that this is not an issue that can happen in this country,” Phung said.</p>
<p class="p1">State Senator Yee, an advocate and author of some human trafficking legislation, cites the 2007 state task force statistics on his <a href="http://www.lelandyee.com/issues/public-safety/">own website</a>, saying trafficking remains “a significant problem, particularly in San Francisco.” The statistics: Forty-seven percent of victims are used in prostitution, 33 percent in domestic servitude, 5 percent in sweatshops and 2 percent in agriculture.</p>
<p class="p1">But Yee and his staff clearly did not read the footnotes. On the last two pages of the 128-page report, the task force in 2007 disavowed the reliability of its own statistics. The task force got back only 10 percent of the more than 1,000 surveys it sent to organizations working on the issues.</p>
<p class="p1">“This is a very low response rate, a respectable rate being at least close to 50 percent,” the report said. “Thus, the results are not scientifically reliable. We have included the results in the report, however, because many of the results mirror what is already known about human trafficking.”</p>
http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/bay-area-agencies-improvise-tactics-to-battle-trafficking#commentsCivil & human rightsSan FranciscoBay AreaCaliforniaHuman TraffickingSpring 2012Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreachdiary of a sex slavefederal bureau of justice adminstrationhuman traffickingjason foxkamala harrislabor traffickingLeland YeeNancy O'Malleyoperation gilded cagepolk gulchSally LieberSan Francisco Police Departmentsex traffickingslaverythe village voiceTom McClintockWed, 15 Feb 2012 20:47:26 +00001245 at http://sfpublicpress.orgJason Winshell